The Future of Documents

The Digital Universe is growing at an incredible pace - see this recent IDC report sponsored by EMC. Staggering numbers on data and document storage for the entreprise: the amount of data created, stored or duplicated in 2006 reached 161 billion gigabytes.  Interesting point of comparison: that is about 3 million times the amount of information contained in all books ever written !

Probably not a surprise to the reader of this blog, the share of the document in that storage space is growing. According to this article on ZDNET France, professionals in storage solutions, such as EMC, claim information is increasingly “unstructured” - which they describe as “data which cannot be processed automatically by software and information systems e.g. letters, emails, books, reports, images or videos, resumes, etc…“. Good old electronic document !

Documents, and user-created content (a la Web 2.0, which can be considered as a form of document) is expected to grow from 70 to 90% of that overall storage space over the next few years.

This information explosion and the storage of so much unsupervised content can have some security and compliance implications - as IDC states, “20% of the digital universe is subject to compliance rules and standards, and about 30% is potentially subject to security applications.”

Will this universe continue to expand endlessly, from its original “big bang” (the creation of the Computer ?) ? Or, just like the paper universe, will mankind realize resources are scarce and will this universe naturally reach an equilibrium or even decline ? Time will tell… but don’t expect this to happen in the near future: the digital universe is expected to increase more than six times, up to 988 exabytes, by 2010.